Most of the work people do in developed economies these days pertain to using a computer and talking on the phone. Millions of people do it all the time at their office, and mobile phones have many functionalities associated with personal computers, such as color displays and text editors.
When people call each other, the caller can choose to send, and the recipient can choose to receive and display, a Caller ID. This caller ID is typically the phone number of the originating telephone subscription, but clever mobile phones also convert the Caller ID into a name, if the call originating number is found in the address book of the mobile phone under a certain name.
Furthermore, there are some directory enquiries companies that show the caller based on a lookup from a directory, and charge the consumer for these lookups. In addition to this EP 1 587 291 B1 discusses a method where the Caller ID can be enhanced by pushing more exotic multimedia data to the recipient of the call. US 2005/0069095 A1 on the other hand discusses finding the caller ID of the sender of a voicemail, by different methods of searching voicemails in order to discover the Caller ID. These documents are cited as references in this application.
These aforementioned methods have several disadvantages. The directory enquiry companies perform the lookup from a proprietary database and/or table, and deliver very limited, expensive information, typically limited to only the name registered to the telephone number in an SMS message for a fee of tens of cents per message. Adding more exotic broadband data to the Caller ID and pushing it to the recipients makes no sense, if there is no relevant data to push into terminals. Very few terminals are also compatible with broadband Caller ID, which would require standardization among mobile phone manufacturers that is difficult to achieve. Discovering the caller ID from a voicemail afterwards would not have helped during the missed call, quite obviously. A plain call log as in the prior art does not prepare the user to the eventual conversation in more detail either. Furthermore, the conventional phone book applications in subscriber terminals do not provide any useful recent background information for a call either, they only manage the contact information.